The justice of God
The justice of God
Men and women of moral sensitivity have always been perplexed by the seeming injustice of God’s providence. This is far from being a modern problem. Ever since Abraham, indignant that God intended in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to kill the righteous with the wicked, uttered his anguished cry, ‘Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?’ (Gen. 18:25), the characters and authors of the Bible have struggled with this question. It is one of the recurring themes of the Wisdom Literature and dominates the book of Job. Why do the wicked flourish and the innocent suffer? ‘Sin and death’, human transgression and divine judgment, are said to be bracketed, even riveted together, so why do we not more frequently see sinners overwhelmed? Instead, more often than not, they seem to escape with impunity. The righteous, on the other hand, are frequently overtaken by disaster. Not only does God not protect them, he does not answer their prayers or even seem to care about their fate. So there is evidently a need for a ‘theodicy’, a vindication of the justice of God, a justification to humankind of the apparently unjust ways of God.
The Bible responds to this need in two complementary ways, first by looking on to the final judgment and secondly (from the perspective of New Testament believers) by looking back to the decisive judgment which took place at the cross. As to the first, this was the standard Old Testament answer to the problem, for example in Psalm 73. Evil people prosper. They are healthy and wealthy. In spite of their violence, their arrogance and their impudent defiance of God, they get away with it. No thunderbolt from heaven strikes them down. The psalmist admits that by envying their freedom to sin and their immunity to suffering, he had almost turned away from God, for his thoughts were more those of a ‘brute beast’ than of a godly Israelite. He failed to come to any satisfactory understanding until he ‘entered the sanctuary of God’. But then he ‘understood their final destiny’. The place on which they stand so self-confidently is more slippery than they realize, and one day they will fall, ruined by the righteous judgment of God.
This same certainty of ultimate judgment, when the imbalances of justice will be redressed, is several times repeated in the New Testament. Paul tells the Athenian philosophers that God has overlooked idolatry in the past only because ‘he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed’, and he warns his readers in Rome not to presume on the riches of God’s ‘kindness, tolerance and patience’, which are giving them space in which to repent. Peter addresses the same message to ‘scoffers’ who ridicule the notion of a future day of judgment; the reason for its non-arrival is that God in his patience is holding the door of opportunity open a while longer, ‘not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance’.14
If the first part of the biblical theodicy is to warn of future and final judgment, the second is to declare that the judgment of God has already taken place at the cross. That is why sins were allowed, as it were, to accumulate in Old Testament days without being either punished (as they deserved) or pardoned (since ‘it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins’). But now, says the writer to the Hebrews, Christ ‘has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant’.15 In other words, the reason for God’s previous inaction in the face of sin was not moral indifference but personal forbearance until Christ should come and deal with it on the cross. The classical passage on this theme is Romans 3:21–26, to which we now turn.
But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished – he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus.
Charles Cranfield has described these six verses as ‘the centre and heart’ of the whole letter to the Romans. In order to understand them, we shall have to begin with at least a brief discussion of that enigmatic phrase in verse 21, ‘But now a righteousness from God...has been made known’. The wording is almost identical with 1:17 (‘for...a righteousness from God is revealed’), except that the verbs are in the past and present tenses respectively. Whatever the ‘righteousness from God’ may be, it is clear that the revelation of it is in the gospel. It was revealed there when the gospel first came to be formulated, and it continues to be revealed there whenever the gospel is preached. To be sure, this is not the only revelation Paul mentions. He has already affirmed that God’s power and deity are revealed in the creation (1:19–20), and that to the ungodly who suppress the truth God’s wrath is revealed from heaven (1:18), particularly in the moral disintegration of society. But the same God who has revealed his power in creation and his wrath in society has also revealed his righteousness in the gospel.
The meaning of ‘the (or ‘a’) righteousness of God’ has been endlessly debated. Three main explanations have been given. First, according to the medieval tradition, it was said to be the divine attribute of righteousness or justice, as in verses 25 and 26 where God is said to ‘demonstrate’ it. The trouble with this interpretation is that God’s justice normally issues in judgment (e.g. Rev. 19:11), which is hardly the ‘good news’ revealed in the gospel. Luther held this view at first, and it almost drove him to despair. Of course, if God’s justice could be shown in certain circumstances to issue in justification rather than in judgment, that would be a different matter. But I am anticipating.
Secondly, according to the Reformers the phrase meant a righteous status which is ‘of God’ (genitive) in the sense that it is ‘from God’ (as the NIV renders it), i.e. bestowed by him. It is ‘apart from law’ (v. 21), because the function of the law is to condemn not to justify, although ‘the Law and the Prophets testify’ to it, because it is an Old Testament doctrine. Since we are all ourselves unrighteous (3:10) and cannot establish our own righteousness (3:20; 10:3), God’s righteousness is a free gift (5:17), which we ‘submit to’ (10:3), ‘receive’ (9:30), ‘have’ (Phil. 3:9) and so even ‘become’ (2 Cor. 5:21). ‘God’s righteousness’, being a gift to the unrighteous received by faith in Christ alone (v. 22), is in fact nothing other than justification.
Thirdly, a number of scholars have drawn attention to the Old Testament passages, especially in the Psalms and Isaiah, in which ‘God’s righteousness’ and ‘God’s salvation’ are synonyms, and refer to God’s initiative in coming to the rescue of his people and vindicating them when oppressed.16 In this case the ‘righteousness of God’ is neither his attribute of justice, nor his gift of the justified status, but his dynamic, saving activity. The main objection to this interpretation is that Paul, although declaring that the law and the prophets testify to God’s righteousness, does not quote any of the appropriate verses.
The second of the three interpretations best fits each context in which the expression occurs, and seems almost certainly correct. On the other hand, it may not be necessary altogether to reject the other two. For if the righteousness of God is the righteous standing he gives to those who believe in Jesus, it is by his dynamic saving activity that such a gift is available and bestowed, and the whole operation is fully consonant with his justice. The ‘righteousness of God’, then, might be defined as ‘God’s righteous way of righteoussing the unrighteous’; it is the righteous status which he bestows on sinners whom he justifies. Moreover, as we saw in the last chapter, his free and gracious act of justifying is ‘through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus’ (v. 24), whom ‘God presented (some think ‘purposed’) as a propitiatory sacrifice’ (v. 25). If God in Christ on the cross had not paid the price of our ransom and propitiated his own wrath against sin, he could not have justified us.
Now the reason why ‘he did this’, namely presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, was ‘to demonstrate his justice’. So important is this divine objective that the apostle states it twice in virtually identical words, although each time he adds a different explanation. The first time he looks back to the past, and says that God demonstrated his justice at the cross ‘because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished’ (v. 25). The second time he looks on from the cross to the present and future, and says that God demonstrated (indeed goes on demonstrating) his justice ‘at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus’ (v. 26).
By his past forbearance towards sinners God had created a problem for himself. Sin, guilt and judgment are supposed to be inexorably linked in his moral world. Why, then, had he not judged sinners according to their works? A theodicy was needed to vindicate his justice. Although in self-restraint he might postpone his judgment, he could not allow the backlog of human sins to mount up indefinitely, let alone cancel the judgment altogether. If God does not justly punish sin, he would be ‘unjust to himself’, as Anselm put it, or, in James Denney’s words, he would ‘not do justice to himself’ but rather ‘do himself an injustice’.17 In fact he would destroy both himself and us. He would cease to be God and we would cease to be fully human. He would destroy himself by contradicting his divine character as righteous Lawgiver and Judge, and he would destroy us by contradicting our human dignity as morally responsible persons created in his image. It is inconceivable that he should do either. So, although in his forbearance he temporarily left sins unpunished, now in justice he has punished them, by condemning them in Christ. He has thus demonstrated his justice by executing it. And he has done it publicly (which some think is the emphasis of the verb ‘presented’), in order not only to be just but also to be seen to be just. Because of his past appearance of injustice in not punishing sins, he has given a present and visible proof of justice in bearing the punishment himself in Christ.
No-one can now accuse God of condoning evil, and so of moral indifference or injustice. The cross demonstrates with equal vividness both his justice in judging sin and his mercy in justifying the sinner. For now, as a result of the propitiatory death of his Son, God can be ‘just and the justifier’ of those who believe in him. He is able to bestow a righteous status on the unrighteous, without compromising his own righteousness.
We should see more clearly now the relation between the achievement of the cross (illustrated in the four images examined in the last chapter) and the revelation of God. By bearing himself in Christ the fearful penalty of our sins, God not only propitiated his wrath, ransomed us from slavery, justified us in his sight, and reconciled us to himself, but thereby also defended and demonstrated his own justice. By the way he justified us, he also justified himself. This is the theme of P. T. Forsyth’s book The Justification of God, which, being published in 1916, he subtitled ‘lectures for wartime on a Christian theodicy’. ‘There is no theodicy for the world’, he wrote, ‘except in a theology of the Cross. The only final theodicy is that self-justification of God which was fundamental to his justification of men. No reason of man can justify God in a world like this. He must justify himself, and he did so in the cross of his Son.’18